| | May 20168CIOReviewTechnology Enabled Sales TrasformationsBy Alan Love, Director, PwCThe pace of change in today's business environment, coupled with evolving customer expectations, requires sales and IT leaders to re-evaluate their commercial strategies and supporting technologies in order to stay on top. The most successful companies are re-imagining and re-shaping their futures through strategies that seamlessly tie traditionally disparate business functions and processes together. The commercial agenda is broad and requires re-envisioning of traditional sales, marketing, and service functions.The Journey of Commercial TransformationStart where you can realize value. Transforming your sales organization and the technology platform that supports it is typically a long-term, multiphase process. Value delivery must be demonstrated early and throughout the program lifecycle. So, look for the projects and capabilities that offer the best balance of complexity to address and ability to deliver business value. Determine your timeline for change and locate initiatives on a detailed roadmap. Build a compelling business case that demonstrates the ability to deliver short-term and long-term value. Delivering short-term results is especially critical to generating momentum and maintaining executive/stakeholder support. IT leaders must work with business leaders to prioritize the initiatives that provide the capabilities needed to "move the needle" in key performance metrics. In the end, the key is to get started. Organizations often fall into two categories--unfocused or indecisive. The unfocused group starts too many projects or initiatives that consequently fail to gain traction. The indecisive group continually discusses prospective projects, but they never pull the trigger. So, define needed capabili-ties and the portfolio of projects required to enable them. Prioritize them in light of business value and get started.Keys to Effective Commercial Transformation ProgramAlign to the customer journey. One of the key drivers of change for sales leaders is the shift in power from the seller to the buyer in both Business-to-Consumer and Business-to-Business en-vironments. Buyer's conduct much of their buying journey on their own before inviting a seller into the process. There-fore, your technology enabled sales process must align to the customer buying process. It is im-portant to start with a keen un-derstanding of the buyer journey. At a high level, buyer's move through the process--transitioning from awareness to intent to purchase. How do you support value delivery specifically targeted to the re-quirements of each stage in the buyer journey? The goal is to become a "customer-easy" organization that reduces friction in the buyer journey.IN MY OPINION
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